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The colorless place had no edges.

Scarlet floated in it, unbound by gravity, by time, by the weight of flesh and bone. The ambulance sirens faded into complete silence. The searing fire in her side dissolved into nothing. She was aware of her body somewhere below, but it felt distant and unimportant, like a coat she had taken off and left behind.

This was the space between heartbeats. The pause between breaths. The moment just before falling asleep, stretched into a strange eternity.

She should have been afraid. She should have been screaming, fighting, clawing her way back to life. But fear required adrenaline, and she had no body to pump it through her veins. Instead, she felt only a vast, hollow calm.

The world below her looked wrong. The colors were too flat, too muted. The ambulance lights that had been so bright now seemed dull and distant. She watched the paramedics work on her body with a detached curiosity. That was her down there. That broken, bleeding thing was Scarlet Lewis.

It did not feel like her anymore.

Movement caught her attention. It was not in the ambulance, but around it. Shapes flickered at the edges of her vision. When she tried to focus on them, they slid away, always just out of sight. But she could feel their presence. A deep chill. They were watching. Waiting.

The ashen fog thickened. It pressed in from all sides, soft and suffocating. Scarlet tried to push through it, but there was nothing to push with. She had no hands. No body. She was just a point of consciousness floating in an endless void.

Then she heard them.

Whispers. There were dozens of them, maybe hundreds. They came from everywhere and nowhere, overlapping and tangled together into a meaningless sound. She could not make out any words, only the desperate, urgent tone. It was like people calling from a great distance, trying to be heard over a storm.

The shapes in her peripheral vision grew more solid. Figures, she realized. They were human-shaped but wrong. They flickered like bad television reception, there and not there, solid and transparent at the same time. Some walked past the ambulance without seeming to see it. Others stood still, frozen in the middle of a gesture. All of them whispered.

A chill settled deep inside her. It was a cold that had nothing to do with temperature. It was the cold of empty spaces and forgotten things. The cold of endings.

One figure stood closer than the others. It was an old man in a hospital gown, his face twisted in fear. He clutched at his chest, his mouth open in a silent scream. He collapsed. He rose. He collapsed again. The same motion, over and over, caught in an endless, repeating circuit.

Scarlet wanted to look away, but she could not. She had no eyelids to close. The dim place held her suspended, forcing her to witness this silent torment.

More figures emerged from the fog. A woman in a business suit, with blood streaming from a wound in her head. A child sitting cross-legged on the ground, crying without making a sound. A man who stepped forward and vanished, stepped forward and vanished, forever walking into nothing.

They were ghosts. The word rose unbidden in her mind. They had to be ghosts.

But ghosts were not real. Ghosts were stories people told in the dark. They were tricks of light and shadow, wishful thinking from people who could not accept the finality of death.

Yet here they were. And here she was. Floating between life and death, watching the dead replay their final moments in an endless, tormented cycle.

The whispers grew louder. More insistent. They pressed against her consciousness like hands, pulling her deeper into the ashen expanse. Scarlet tried to resist, but she had nothing to push back with. She was dissolving into the fog, becoming part of the whispers herself.

Then, sharp and sudden, pain.

It exploded through her chest, electric and violent. Her heart, somewhere far below in her distant body, lurched back into rhythm. The connection between her consciousness and her flesh snapped taut like a rubber band.

The colorless place shattered.

Scarlet crashed back into her body with enough force to make her gasp. Agony flooded every nerve. Her lungs burned. Her side screamed where the knife had torn through her. But she was solid again. Real again. Alive.

The ambulance rocked around her. The siren wailed. The paramedic’s face swam into focus above her, relief clear in his eyes.

“Welcome back,” he said. “You gave us a scare there.”

Scarlet tried to speak. Her throat was raw, her voice a broken whisper. “The people…”

“Easy. Do not try to talk. You are going to be okay.”

But she had to tell him. She had to make him understand. “The people in the fog. Did you see them?”

He exchanged a glance with his partner. It was the kind of glance that said brain damage, oxygen deprivation, hallucination.

“There is no one here but us,” he said gently. “You have been through a significant trauma. Your brain is trying to process it. Just rest.”

Scarlet wanted to argue. She wanted to grab him and make him look, really look, at the figures she could still see flickering at the edges of the ambulance. But exhaustion dragged at her, heavy and irresistible.

Her eyes drifted shut. The last thing she saw before consciousness faded was the old man in the hospital gown, still clutching his chest. Still dying. Still trapped in his final, terrible moment.

And the cold certainty that she would see him again.